Inside Spidey's Web: "Shear Strength"

Welcome to our weekly feature, Inside Spidey's Web, where The Spectacular Spider-Man's Supervising Producer and Story Editor Greg Weisman discusses the most recent episode of the animated series with IGN TV.

This week, we're focusing on "Shear Strength", which saw Spidey and George Stacy both working to save a kidnapped Gwen and the revelation of the true identity of the Master Planner. Have a question for a future installment of Inside Spidey's Web? Shoot us an email at feedback_tv@ign.com.

IGN: You've done some storylines on this show have diverged from the original comics. In the case of the Master Planner, did you know from the start that you wanted to stick with the original stories and make him Doctor Octopus or were other ideas considered?

Weisman: No, I pretty much was going to do the Doc Ock thing – the underwater fortress, or lair. I wanted to preserve some mystery. Those Master Planner stories were very influential to me. They had a really big impact. So I wanted to, as much as possible, preserve as many aspects of those stories as made sense for our continuity. And that included making a mystery as to who the Master Planner was, so we truly tried our best to fool people – even though we were going to go the way most people expected us to go. [Laughs] That's a challenge. It's a definite challenge to try and create a mystery out of something that everybody already knows the answer to.

IGN: I have a couple of Master Planner related reader questions. First off, John Ruggeri wants you to know "This is the best Spider-Man series ever." His question is:

"Seeing last week's episode and then this week's episode, it makes me wonder if Dr. Octopus is developing a split personality or if he was faking everything last week - like the screaming when the tentacles came for him at the end of the episode."

Weisman: He was faking.

IGN: My follow up to John's question is, how did Doc Ock communicate with the Sinister Six last week, when he was locked up in Ravencroft?

Weisman: I don't think Ravencroft is an extremely high security facility. I think that inmates aren't actually inmates – most of them are actually patients. So they have access to computers. Even prisons have access to computers these days. So communication wasn't the hardest aspect of what Otto was trying to pull off.

IGN: This week he quickly revealed himself to what was left of the Sinister Six. Why did he want to keep it a secret from them last week?

Weisman: I think what we saw this week was his inner circle. Tinkerer, Electro, Vulture – that's the inner circle. Those people were in on it. But not every member of the Sinister Six was part of that inner circle. So although Sandman, Rhino, Kraven are all free, on the loose and still affiliated with the Master Planner, none of the three of them were part of the inner circle, so they didn't know that Ock was the Master Planner. But the other three did know. So that's what we were trying to show by keeping specifically those three in – to tell you the hierarchy.

"I loved the recreating of the classic comic book panel of Spidey trapped under rubble as water rises around him. What's the thought process in recreating comic panel shots, and is it something you want to do more of or only once in a while?"

Weisman: I think if you look at the first season and a third [that have aired], over and over again we're borrowing iconic imagery from the movies and from the original comic books especially… Our reveal of Mary Jane in episode 6, the one with the Lizard in episode 3, the origin story in episode 12 - which borrowed from both the movies and Amazing Fantasy #15. We've been trying as much as possible to bring in this iconic imagery.

Obviously the image of Spider-Man underneath that wreckage is one of two or three of the most iconic Spider-Man images ever, so there wasn't any doubt that we wanted to reproduce that in as authentic a way as we could. So in the script itself, it makes reference to specific pages of Amazing Spider-Man. And then of course we had a wonderful director, Jennifer Coyle, who took that and ran with that and really brought all that to life. You throw in some great music from our composers -- Kristopher Carter, Lolita Ritmanis and Michal McCuistion -- and then some great sound work from Advantage Audio, and great voice work from Josh Keaton and our voice director Jamie Thomason and Vic Cook and everyone who participated in that sequence… They really all work together to bring something that was flat on a page to life.